Canada's 'Orphan Works' Regime: Unlocatable Owners and the Copyright Board
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses Canada’s approach to the problem of unlocateable copyright owners, more commonly called the problem of orphan works. Section 77 of the Copyright Act empowers the Copyright Board of Canada to issue a non-exclusive licence to an applicant whose reasonable efforts to locate a copyright owner have been unsuccessful. The article begins with a legal analysis of this statutory scheme, based on a review of every application made to the Board pursuant to s 77. These applications were catalogued into a database to facilitate detailed, empirical review and statistical analysis. This analysis lays the groundwork for comparisons among the Canadian system and approaches that already exist or are being considered in other jurisdictions, an evaluation of the underlying public policy issues, and a discussion of possible legislative or regulatory responses to the problem.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it